The Leader-Leader Approach with L. David Marquet
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“It's the contribution that makes us feel better. It's not feeling better that makes us contribute.”
— David Marquet
The Power of Language in Leadership
- Encourage "we" language to build unity and trust.
- Leaders using inclusive language influence organizational culture.
- Use role-reversal debates to enhance listening and problem-solving.
Redefining Leadership: From Directing to Empowering
- Shift from directive to empowering leadership emphasized.
- Transition to asking neutral questions and creating a safe input environment.
- Start conversations with descriptions to engage team members.
The Shift to Leader-Leader Model: A New Approach
- Move from leader-follower to leader-leader model.
- Challenge permission-based structures.
- Empower all levels to assume leadership, maintaining respect for hierarchy.
Exploring Leadership Dynamics: Control and Contribution
- Focus on contribution over control for satisfaction.
- Delegate based on team competence.
- Shift from seeking permission to informing of decisions.
The Importance of Clarity in Leadership and Decision-Making
- Continuously question the "why" behind decisions.
- Use reflective conversations to identify understanding gaps.
- Clarify timelines to align team efforts with goals.
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Mike Goldman: : I am super excited about this guest. I just did a workshop based on one of his books with one of my clients a month ago, and they ate it up. And I first saw him speak God, it was probably eight or nine years ago, maybe 10 years ago, fell in love with it. So I'm super excited to have him on the show.
Mike Goldman: A 1981 US Naval Academy graduate captain David Marquet served in the US submarine force for 28 years after being assigned to command the nuclear power submarine USS Santa Fe, then ranked last in retention and operational standing. He realized the traditional leadership approach of take control, give orders wouldn't work.
He turned this ship around by treating the crew as leaders, not followers and giving control. Not taking control. This approach took the Santa Fe from worst to first, achieving the highest retention and operational standing in the Navy. He's the author of Turn the Ship Around, a true story of turning followers into leaders.
Fortune Magazine called the book the best how to manual anywhere for managers on delegating, training, and driving flawless execution. He's also the author of Leadership is Language. Captain Marquet retired from the Navy in 2009. He now speaks to those who want to create empowering work environments that release the passion, initiative, and intellect of each person. His bold and highly effective framework is summarized as give control, create leaders, David, welcome to the show.
David Marquet: Thanks Mike for having me on the show. Yeah that was Verne who wrote that fortune blurb. Verne, yeah, yeah. Verne Harnish wrote that fortune blurb, which I really respect it because it was right when the book came out and everybody else.
When you write a book, it's a terrible experience and you publish it and your mom buys it and you're kind of hoping that something's going to happen. And most people, when you send it to them, it was like, well, who are you? And like, how many followers do you have on Twitter? It's like zero and zero, but Verne read the book. And he named it the number one business book of the year.
Mike Goldman: Him and your mom, those are the two folks that read the book initially.
David Marquet: Yeah, those are the two first, yeah, those are patient zero and one. But of course after Verne said that, I was off to the races. So I'm truly indebted to those who, to Verne in particular, and those who are willing to engage and really understand content.
Mike Goldman: Yeah love it.
David Marquet: So thanks for that. That's why I'm here.
Mike Goldman: Verne wrote the foreword to my first book. So we're in good company.
David Marquet: Ah, super.
Mike Goldman: So, hey, I want to ask you.
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: Before we dive in specifically to your book and your experience, and I want you to tell us the story of the USS Santa Fe. I've read about it a couple times now. I've read your book twice, so I know it pretty well, but I'd rather you tell it than me.
But this show is all about creating better leadership teams. So I want to ask you from your experience, you know, as a sub captain and then your experience since then and working with organizations, what do you think is the one most important characteristic of a great leadership team?
David Marquet: They gotta refer to each other with the word WE. And when I talk to teams, as soon as I hear they. I know there's fractures and there's problems. All those guys are in marketing and they're in engineering or whatever it happens to be. And I like to listen to the language pretty carefully. And when I hear we, we, we even if even if someone knows it was really the other person's fault, they say, well, we let the customer down. That's gonna be a good team because you don't have blame. You have high trust. It's going to work together and then that's going to cascade out that feeling that culture that that practice will then cascade out. So if the leaders can say "we" then two levels down some engineer and software can say "we" about someone over in sales and that's going to cascade down. It's going to pay off big dividends throughout the organization.
Mike Goldman: I love that because what I've seen and I worked with leadership teams, you know, pretty much all day, every day, although I guess not all day everyday
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: Right now I'm talking to you, but other than that, and one of the interesting things I find and you just referred to it is, if let's say the VP of sales and VP of service are not getting along real well at a leadership team level.
David Marquet: Yeah.
I know as I cascade down that organization, that problem is getting worse, not better. So I love that. If they're not saying we at that level.
Right.
Mike Goldman: It's getting worse as you go down.
David Marquet: Right. It only gets worse, right? It only gets worse. We had a client where we had a situation like that and the CEO was pulling his hair out and he said this is a software company in California. He's like yeah so what should I do with these two guys? And it's like, well send them out and then when they come back. They have to argue the other person's position.
It was like, it was a particular issue about, you know, Betamax or VHS or something, I don't know. So it was a particular issue, I said, well you sent them out, and when they come back they have to argue, and when you argue the other person's position, you can't say something like, well. Stop. Or this is stupid. Stop.
You have to argue it as if you have to convince me that you believe it. You don't have to believe it, but I want it to sound like you believe it because you can't argue something like that unless you truly listen to the other person. So anyway, it was kind of funny because then I called him a week later because I was curious what would happen here.
And I said, wait, what happened? And he's like, yeah, I don't know. They never came back because it's just really just a trick to get people to listen to each other. And then once that happens. They, you know, they solve their own problems. And so rather than having everything escalate and the boss be the adjudicator.
Okay we're going to go this way. No we're going to go that way. Stop it. Just you guys go away. Come back and we argue each other's position.
Mike Goldman: I love that I'm definitley stealing that idea.
David Marquet: And we'll go from there.
Mike Goldman: I love that. So tell us.
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: It's such a fascinating story.
Tell us the story of how you wind up on the USS Santa Fe and how that experience caused you to kind of change, change the way, change the way you led.
David Marquet: Yeah, yeah. So I was this geeky kid growing up in the 70s in New England and we were in the Cold War and I really felt passionately about what the country stood for and the Constitution. And I decided not to be, go down the scientist path like my dad. I come home and told my mom, hey, I'm going to join the military. And she's like, ah. And but I said, look, there's submarines. They hide from people. It'll be perfect for me. And she's like, yeah, I can see that.
So I went into submarines and my leadership book at the time that the government gave me said, leadership can be defined as directing the thoughts, plans, and actions, thoughts, plans, and actions of others directing. And who was I to question that? And, to be honest, I liked it and I was good at it and I liked it because I visualized a world where I was the leader and through my force of intellect had the team do what my great ideas were. As a result, we would get better and then they'd be happier. And then what happened was I just happened to go to my first job was a place that needed some help.
And I applied this approach and it worked and we got better and the team sort of grudgingly went along. And then when I left, you know what happened? Back to the way it was. And that was even more proof of what a great leader I was. And certainly in the eyes of the Navy, I got at awards, I got promoted, ma a submarine captain. Now, sure, I always had, like, there was a Jekyll and Hyde part of it to it. Like, I liked being the guy giving orders and instructions and seeing the problem first, but I didn't like it when my boss did that to me. And I'm pretty sure the team didn't like it happening to them. Of course, I said, hey, you guys are empowered.
Hey, you guys speak up. I would invite them to speak up, but it always occurred within this structure of I'm going to tell you what to do. Leader is, the decider. The teams, they execute. The leader gets to make the what decisions. The team only gets to make how decisions. Fast forward. So I get selected.
I'm going to go to the submarine command, which is, it's a great job. I was all jazzed up to go to this job. And for 12 months, the Navy sends you to school to learn your ship. And knowing and telling is linked. The person who knows gets to tell, and the person who's the teller better know the answer.
So we spent a lot of time making sure the person's, who's the CEO, or the COO, whatever the boss knows the answer. And then, at the very last minute, so I had two weeks ago after this 12 weeks, 12 months, of studying one submarine, they said, no, no, no, no. You're going to go to Santa Fe because that submarine captain quit.
But the kicker was, it was a different kind of ship, not the kind of just spent 12 months studying, not the kind I've ever been on before ever in my life. Different reactor plant, missile tubes, sonar system, all the technical parts of the ship were different. And so I show up now I'm a believer. I mean, I was a quote believer in empowerment, but now my life literally depends upon it.
And if I give orders, they're going to do it. And so the whole answer is the problem wasn't I gave a bad order, which is the way I would frame it in the past. The problem was I was the one giving the order. So I needed the team to tell me and every time I told them what to do, it just made it harder. So I had to, step one of the whole process was I had to shut the f up and say, well, what do you guys, and I had to get really good at asking very neutral questions.
Hey, well what do you guys think? And I had to ask questions. Then I had to learn how to ask questions in a way that made it safe for them to speak up and it always started with description. I felt I learned that description is where you start. So it's a hey boss. We got a problem, what do you want us to do?
I would just well tell me more. What do you see? What do you know about it that I don't know? What do you know about it that would surprise me. So this applies. It doesn't matter whether you're running a hotel or a software company or a steel mill or a nuclear power plant or anything. It doesn't matter.
This is where you want to start. You always start with description and you want to get the person to tell you. My objective was I wanted them to say, here's what I intend to do. Because once they say that. They own it, because you can ask questions. You can say, you could veto it, but it comes from them.
As soon as you say, well, here's what I want you to do. I want you to get 737 Max up in the air. I want you to build these cars with diesel engines, but have high performance and emissions compliant, whatever. Yeah, boss, but you can't actually, we can't do that. It's not, hey don't bother me with these.
I'll just make it happen. And we get what we get. So we're now, what we're doing is inviting the team into the what space before that was just secret space where the boss lived. And we only think we could do is figure out how, how are we going to get these cars out? How are we going to get this new airplane up in the air?
We don't get to say, you know what? This actually isn't a good idea. We shouldn't do it. We shouldn't launch the software. We need two more weeks of testing.
Mike Goldman: Yeah, and I know you encapsulate that and I love the phrasing you use in the book going from a leader follower model to a leader leader model.
David Marquet: Right and so in my head, so I was a physics major and there's laws of physics, which are really hard to violate. Yeah if I drop this thing, it's, I bet it's going to fall. Oh, look, it did. So we can't violate laws of physics, but we have all these other quote laws that are organizational laws, but they're not laws of physics.
I kept being struck by the fact that we treated these laws like there were laws of physics. Here's an example. If you're in a permission based organization, which first, that's the first question is why are we getting permission? I don't know. We always do. That's how we do it. It's like, well, was that a decision we made or we just, anyway.
So you sign, you put a form in and it has three people who need to sign it. And the second person says, no, I disagree. What happens in every organization I've talked to is the form goes back down to the first person to rework it and come back up to the stakeholders. There was an article about Bayer making a new initiative to make it things happen faster.
And they talked about, one case, eight stakeholders and six are happy, but two aren't. That means I got to go revamp the product and go back to all eight once again. So, but again, why? So I changed that rule. I said, look, if you submit a thing and the final authority is this captain, it's going to come to me.
I don't care if everybody in between votes. No, I'm still going to put my eyeballs on it. I want to see it. You can vote. I don't like it. If you're in the middle, I don't like it or this would be a good idea. If dot, dot, dot, well, this had tremendous, like this simple, simple thing had tremendous ramifications because now imagine you're a sailor, you're putting in a an idea form. You know, it doesn't matter what everyone in the middle is going to say. It's going to go all the way to the boss. You're going to make sure that's a good idea. You're going to vet it with your peers. You're going to talk about it. So what happened, what middle management says is, oh my job is to filter out all the stupid ideas from all the stupid people who work here. I'm like no. And so, like people get heard. And so this idea that it's leader and follower white collar, blue collar. Decision maker, the person, people who execute the decision, the what people and the how people, it's just what, it's not a law of physics.
We can choose to do it. And I wanted everybody to think about themselves as leaders in one context. I also wanted everyone to think of themselves as followers, but a follow follow organization doesn't have as much cache, but you're both at the same time, you're following the values and the principles, everybody, including the guy on top or the gal on top. We're thinking about it at my desk. How do I support those things as a leader?
Mike Goldman: So to execute on that, you in your book, you talk about these three mechanisms, the control competence and clarity, and there's a, it's a whole bunch of.
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: Depth of content underneath those. But, with the first one with control. Tell us what does that mean? Why is it important? And maybe we'll talk about an example.
David Marquet: The next ten times you go to a restaurant get the server to choose your meal for you. So that you know what you're gonna have when they put in front of you control we all are addicted to control and we think we're being safer when I can control it. But the problem is you're not. It's an illusion of safety because what you're doing is, is you're tamping down the sense making and the decision making and the thinking of everybody else because they're coming to you and say, well, boss is going to tell us anyway.
I don't really, you know, how much work am I going to put into it? So, you have to practice giving up control in this exercise go to dinner don't order I'm not saying here's what a lot of people say they hear it the assignment they go out and they say, oh, yeah well, what do you recommend? Chicken or fish. Oh chicken.
Okay, great. I'll have the chicken. No, no, no, no, no, you just ordered chicken I want you not to order anything. I want you to get them to pick and put it in front of you. Then you'll know what you have. If you can't do that delegation, you can't do it at work. Because there's no cost at dinner. Versus what happens at work.
Mike Goldman: A great example of that, that you gave and at least in the book, if I remember right, it was one of the first things that you did was this idea of
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: You know, the what was it that the, if I'm getting it right, the chiefs run the boat was it the chiefs.
David Marquet: Yes.
Mike Goldman: And the idea, it was like a time off policy, something that seems kind of harmless.
David Marquet: Right.
Mike Goldman: But how you drove the decision making all the way down and you know, tell us a little bit more about that.
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: Cause I thought that was a great example.
David Marquet: Yeah, so, Navy regulations state that for the, in the Navy, we have, it's a cast system like most hierarchies are. And one of the big cast divisions is between the officers and the enlisted men. So the officers are officers because they went to college. That's the only thing that really makes you an officer. Anyway and the captain's at the top and the second in command's next. And so by Navy regs, if you're an enlisted man, your leave, your vacation form needs to be signed by the second in command. If you're an officer, it needs to be signed by the captain. Well, we also had this self delusional talk that the chiefs, so this is a middle man, these are the senior enlisted people, ran the navy, the chiefs ran the boat.
It was delusional because they didn't, and everybody knew it, but it was happy talk, we wanted to say it to ourselves, so we kept saying it. They didn't run it, anything, because there was no form. I asked them, I said, do you guys run the ship? Oh, yeah. I said, well, show me all the forms where after a chief signs it, there are no more signatures.
There are zero of those forms, or there were. So you're not running anything if you're not the final signature. You're not in charge. You're advising the person whose person is, that's my feeling. So anyway, so I said, okay, you guys want to? Yeah. I said, well, you're going to be responsible. Okay. So I said, great.
And so I took this thing. You can't start with, you know, we're going to change the way we're going to start the reactor or things like that. Like you can't muck around with those, but in terms of how we treat each other, how we manage permission slips. Sure. So I said, okay, great.
When it comes to vacation, every on those, all those forms, every place where there's an officer's signature, we're just going to just mark it out with big black marker and the senior enlisted person is going to sign for all the enlisted people. And I think this was one of the best decisions I ever made. Number one, because now I'm walking the talk of this. We're going to have an empowered place. Secondly, the crew was kind of able to play mommy, daddy against each other. Like they'd, you know, they'd be a jerk to their immediate boss, but then, you know, be nice to the officer and, you know, and the officer would then override the chief would say, no, you know, he shouldn't go on vacation or, and then the officer would say yes and override them and so we had played all these games and now they couldn't do that.
So actually one of the consequences. There were two unexpected consequences. One was military discipline improved. The year before we had 10, leave before I took over, we had 10 mass case or we call them a captain's mass was where the captain would sit down, basically like a judge, so there, and pass judgment on a sailor, which meant it needed to be a pretty serious offense.
The next year we had zero because the guys did what their chiefs told them to do, which before they could kind of play this game. So, that was number one. Number two is we had to end up with every sailor signed up to stay in the Navy. A hundred percent. Why? I think it's because they looked at their chief and they said, this person matters.
They control the destiny of the organization. And the people who work for him or her and that's a job that's worth having as opposed to what it was before which was these people are just rubber stamped. They don't have any authority. Why would you stay in because they keep it a very small number can jump from being an enlisted person to an officer. There's a small program for that. But in general like if you're an enlisted person you look to the senior enlisted person you say is that's a job I want to stay around 20 years to have and the answer was no obviously because it was a crap job that they just had no auhtority. So now, that all changed.
And it all changed for that one little thing. Now, a little codicil of this was. So my XO, though, got upset. Cause he was the guy who used to sign all these papers. And so now, he's losing authority. So I said, okay, great. You can be the final signature for the officers. So I was giving, so that was Noah the cap.
So I pushed it down to him to aswaj his ego. But and then I just wrote a little memo saying that this was the policy on board the Santa Fe and signed it. It was no longer in compliance with Navy regulations. No one ever took me to task for that because the benefits like the ship immediately started going way up. You know, everything went way way up.
Mike Goldman: Although it's a sign
David Marquet: Almost immediately.
Mike Goldman: It should go way down right?
David Marquet: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, any ship can be a submarine once.
Mike Goldman: And I like that. But let's not lose the significance of what you said.
I think you said that each of the enlisted men kind of re upped, whereas when you, you know, whereas before this, that ship had the worst retention, so.
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: So that's a heck of a
improvement.
David Marquet: Yeah well that was why I went there was because the captain quit. The ship had two problems. He had the lowest morale in the Navy. And one of the metrics for that is how many sailors sign up to stay in the Navy. And it's typically you want about half and the Santa Fe had 10%, which is way below, it was the bottom of the fleet.
So 3 out of 33. And the second thing was, was performing poorly with metrics like getting underway on time or inspection scores and these kind of things. So the captain resigned a year early, which was created the opportunity for me to go there. And I respect him for doing that.
I was a little bit of a controversy in the Navy because he ended up getting promoted, which I thought that was the right call. Cause he did serve for two years and then he got out of the way. But yeah, we had bad, bad morale. But look, no one, here's what I think. No one goes to work and wants to be told what to do and just be a cog and not be listened to.
Nobody likes that. It doesn't matter how many foosball tables you buy and you spread around. It's not going to matter for that. And I get sick and tired of looking like at these engagement, oh, to have a good engagement. This is like this 20 point plan of you're gonna have company picnics and blah, blah, blah.
No one cares. Here's you want to have engaged people give them the ability to make decisions. That's step one. Step two, repeat step one. That's all there is to it. Because as soon as they can make decisions, now they feel like they're contributing for real. And once they feel like they're contributing, now they're gonna, they'll feel better.
It's the contribution that makes us feel better. It's not feeling better that makes us contribute.
Mike Goldman: Beautiful. Love it. So the first big idea is about as a leader, giving up that control to create more leader leader.
David Marquet: Yeah, yeah.
Mike Goldman: And I love, you know, the idea of starting out small with approving time off, not starting off with something that, you know, that could be catastrophic.
David Marquet: Right.
Mike Goldman: And then that leads us into the second big idea, which is, you know, if you are going to give up that control. You need to make sure you've got people that
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: Have a level of competence that you can rely on them. So, talk about that second big idea, that second mechanism of competence.
David Marquet: Yeah so, first of all, going back to control for a second. So one of the things that we do with executive teams or executives that we're coaching is we'll say, okay, write down every decision you made this week. Like just keep a next to your computer. And then go back and pick one and that you would like to be informed on, but you don't actually need to be the decision maker.
You want someone on your team to actually make that decision and just tell you our big word is intend. So we want them to say, hey, we intend to.
Mike Goldman: As opposed to asking for permission.
David Marquet: You know.
Mike Goldman: Can I do this?
David Marquet: Yeah don't, yeah, right, right, right, right. So what normally is I get a form and says, I'd like to request permission to comp this guest breakfast because we were supposed to pick him up and we didn't.
And so it's compensation. We're going to comp him. This is what happened to me the other day. And so, and like, literally I got two days later, I get a note. Oh, your breakfast's on us for your remainder of your stay. Like, I literally don't care anymore. Like, why couldn't the front desk person just say that and just notify?
So anyway, so just pick one. Don't like do the whole thing, but just pick one. And so here's the thing, and sometimes we frame it the other way around. So we say, imagine what your team is coming to you with this intent statement. They're saying, hey, here's what I intend to do. What would you want to know about that?
And typically, there's two big piles of things to know. One is is it like technically the right thing to do? Have we done the testing? Have we built it correctly? Have we done quality check? Is it legal? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So these are the technical things. And then there's like, is it what we wanna do?
So this is kind of like, how are we, and then what or why are we doing it? And that's where this competence comes from.
I made a mistake multiple times where I just gave too much control. I now view it as abdication. Cause my team would come to me and say here's what I intend to do. This is why it's intent.
If you just, we're going to say yes all the time. You might as well just say, just go do stuff, which we don't think is a good way to run a nuclear submarine or a company or anything. So what you want is people stating what they're going to do before they do it. Hey, next week when we meet with this new potential client, we intend to offer the following bundle. Well, that's going to require the software team and the product development team and the delivery teams to all get aligned. Hey, can we do this? Can we deliver it on time? Et cetera. I was talking to a client that just went from their first contract was 20 million. Their second contract was a 900 million dollar contract.
So like, so in order for the sales guy to be able to sell that, we need the whole, we need to know the company. So anyway, so you say, hey, here's what I intend to do. And you create a conversation, not oh, just by the way, I just did this thing. That's not really what you want. But in order to do that, we need to know, can we do it?
So I think this is a big problem. Most organizations are reluctant to understand their people's competence because it feels like we don't trust them. Like I gave my officers a test every week, a written exam every week, except for two. They had two weeks off. So I had 50 exams a year. So I had a very good sense of their technical.
These are hard exams that you could fail. I took the test as well and I rarely was the number one highest score, which was fine, but some captains would think that was threatening. I didn't really didn't care. I didn't, it was great. So in any event, but I wanted a model of behavior I wanted my guys to have.
So you need to know people's competence. If you want to let them make decisions, I mean, it just makes sense if you say, well, I'm going to let you make decisions about the nuclear reactor. You need to know about the nuclear reactor. Well, about fill in nuclear reactor with anything.
Mike Goldman: Yeah.
And one of the things you talk about it is the idea of specifying goals, not methods within competence. Talk a little bit about that.
David Marquet: Yeah,
so if a person on your team like the product owner comes to you and says hey, I got to make a decision. A or B and you're like B, like you think, you know, the answer you immediately, I say, oh yeah I've done this before. And you're like B. And so you just made the decision for them.
So you poached their ownership and their ability to grow into a leader. So what you want to do is be clear on what we're trying to achieve. So say, well, look here, this is what's really important here. This is a new client. He's new in our area. We really got to get this one, right. Speed to market isn't as important in this case as quality of delivery and client satisfaction, unless the speed is like part of that whatever. But you truly convey, I think of these as waiting dials on the decision.
So, you know, I'm going to dial this factor up and this factor down. And so I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I'm telling you how to think about the decision. And then see what they come up with, because you've got 10 of these you're thinking about. They don't have one, or maybe they have three, but you have 30, whatever. They're going to come up with something that you haven't thought of. But if you tell them the answer, all you get is what you know, and you're not leveraging all the brains of everybody else in the organization. That's the most underutilized resource we have in every organization, which means on the planet. Is everybody's thinking because we run organizations in ways which result in the thinking staying in here and not coming out here.
Mike Goldman: I love that. And what it does, if the way leadership typically works where we're giving the answer or we're giving advice, what we're modeling for folks, what we're kind of training folks to do the next time they have a problem is come ask us versus giving them the ability to think
David Marquet: We're creating.
Mike Goldman: About it themselves.
David Marquet: Exactly yeah, we're creating dependencies. Why? Well, either I don't don't think about it. That's just what people did to me or two. I like it because then I have a reason for my paycheck and I have a big line of people out my door waiting to come see the exalted one so I can make decisions and you're the bottleneck.
Yeah, you're the hero which replace hero with bottleneck. You're the bottleneck and the organization and you feel like you're going 100 miles an hour but the organization has a long delay times because until they can get to you everyone is sitting on their hands. That's the permission was designed in the industrial age to prevent employees from doing things.
So if you're running a permission based organization. You're running it using a structure that's designed to stop people from doing things. And if so, if you come to me and say well, how come my people aren't expressing initiative and how come it takes 18 months to get a product to market when I think it should only take six.
It's like, well, you're a permission based organization. You're running it using a structure that is deliberately designed to stop people from being able to take action. So you get what you get, run it with intent. Then you get alignment and action.
Mike Goldman: So the first big idea was control to create this leader, leader environment.
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: Was control, giving up that control.
David Marquet: Right.
Mike Goldman: You know, letting them
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: Control it more throughout the organization. Second one was competence to do that. People have to be competent.
And then the third is clarity. Tell us about that.
Tell us a little bit more about clarity.
David Marquet: So competence, I think competence really rests in the individual to build and develop and demonstrate their competence. I can't make you smart on Python coding. You need to do that, but clarity is why are we doing this? And these are really interesting conversations to me because the officer would come to me and he would say, hey, I'm going to submerge, I intend to submerge the submarine. Next hour over here in this location and the technical part would be pretty pro forma. He would say I've checked the water depth and the hatches are shut all personnel below and we've been assigned this water and long list And then I would say, well why, like what, why did you decide that?
What's behind that decision? How does that align with what we're trying to achieve? And then it would get really interesting. And often I realized I knew things about what we were trying to do with the mission that they didn't know. And it was because I hadn't told them. As much as I thought I had or I'd only told him once and not enough or whatever it happened to be so clarity often comes down from the top, but you need to hear the reflection back to you. So what like tell me like what's your thinking?
What do you what are we trying to achieve here? And these are the kind of conversations that I think really helped them develop into being future submarine commanders. Because one of the most basic, I think the number first clarity question out of your mouth could be, what's the time horizon over which you're planning on winning?
like what's your, you know, what are you trying to win for? Today? Yeah, I'm just going to get through this event. Okay, well then you're going to use different people and say, well, I'm trying to build a team for the quarter century, not for the next quarter.
Well, so I'm living in this quarter by quarter basis as opposed to what I really want. So typically hiring the organization, people have these longer time horizons and lower it's not. Some tension might be healthy. And some going back and forth, but like, let's know. I was, I had a client once their motto was something like building quality products, blah, blah, blah, for the long run. And the CEO was speaking and I was coming up next and I built this poll electronic poll real quick. And I said, hey, I just want to know, what do you guys think? What define the long run and I had multiple choice and I had a week, month, year, a decade, and then just for fun, I wrote today and century and we had responses in every category.
So, yeah, right, right. So we could, we think like we think, oh, this is super clear because I know what I mean when I said it. But if you didn't hear it reflected back, you got people making decisions. They're just trying to get through today. It's going to be a different decision.
Mike Goldman: Yeah I see that so often in the CEOs and leadership teams I work with. Very often the CEO believes they've got a vision for the organization and that vision could be one year, three year, could be a 10 to 15 year big, hairy, audacious goal, but they've got this vision that they believe is clear in their head.
And because they alluded to it two or three times over the last 18 months.
David Marquet: Right.
Mike Goldman: Of course, everybody else knows what it is.
David Marquet: Of course.
Mike Goldman: And by the way there are two problems. One is everybody else doesn't know what it is because you didn't talk about it enough. The second one is often they're not even as clear in their own head as they think they are.
David Marquet: Right.
Mike Goldman: So I've seen this play out in organizations.
David Marquet: Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
Mike Goldman: And by the way, what it does is it adds more stress on the leader because they've got to babysit everybody. That's yeah, you get to be the hero, but that's no fun. That's stressful.
David Marquet: Yeah well, that's what I think. Yeah so that's the model. It's well, if people really don't know if people can't make their own decisions and maybe it's just benign lack of communication, or maybe it's not benign, but if they can't make their own decisions, they've got to come to me. This is in the dictator's playbook.
This is how you create dependencies. Like, you don't never let them know what you're really thinking. Cause they got to come to me and get every decision vetted. And I'm going to say, yes, good yes, no. It's like the inspector at the end of the automobile assembly line. So instead bake the quality of the decision or bake the quality of the paint into the assembly line.
And you do that by building teams that can think and make decisions and by the structure of how you run meetings and those kind of things in the communication. So I spent a lot of time controlling the structure of the communications, which allowed me to release a high degree of control over the, well, we're going to load this torpedo and that torpedo tube tomorrow, because the structure of the communication resulted in a quality. A good paint scheme or a good decision in this case coming out the far end of the assembly line.
Mike Goldman: So here's the question that came up. I said earlier that we reviewed your book and we, with a client, you know, just in the last month reviewed the book. And I always focus on, I don't want a book report. Don't tell me what you thought of the book. Like what from this book
David Marquet: Yeah, yeah.
Mike Goldman: Are we going to inject into the DNA of this organization?
Let's talk about that. And it was super excited.
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: The question that came up that I promised I would ask you. So I talked there. I'm like, hey, I'm interviewing him on my podcast. I could ask this question is
Think about not a sub, but a typical organization that's got, you know, their sales function and their marketing function and their finance function, et cetera, et cetera, is this something, this whole leader, leader idea, is this something that needs to be implemented from the top?
The whole organization is now leader leader or is this something where the technology team could go we don't care what the rest of the organization's doing right now. We love this idea. We're implementing leader leader in the technology organization. Could you do that piece by piece?
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: Or does it have to be more kind of big bang, you know, everybody does it?
David Marquet: Yeah well, I think it's easier and better if everyone does it. And in the person or the people at the top have to be on board. I think it's really extremely like, I wasn't the head of the Navy, but I was the head of my submarine. So I had a lot of control over what happened on the ship. And we would go to sea, we would submerge, we'd be a thousand miles away from my boss.
And so I was setting the tone for the culture. And the communication protocols on the submarine. I think it's hard to do, like if you're the chief marketing officer and the CEO's not on board, I think it's gonna be really, really hard. Now if you're head of engineering and it's a little bit more insular and you got your team and you're doing your thing, I think you could, like we see agile like transformation happen within an engineering team, but we see now that. Oh you kind of run into a limit what you can do if the rest of the organization isn't thinking and aligned in the same way. So that's one of the things I like about this Bayer thing. They're essentially applying agile across the whole organization. So I think the answer is, it's probably possible, but I don't have any really good examples of that.
And all the things happen. You need leadership support. It doesn't cost any money to do this. I mean, you can bring us in or you and that kind of thing, but you don't need to buy new software or anything like that. You just need to start practicing different behaviors in meetings and in one on one conversations.
And every time someone comes up to you and says, tell me what to do, you don't tell him what to do. So it's just a matter of you controlling your own behavior. Your own language and then having that it always starts with self. We always say start with self. That's why we say go to dinner.
Don't order. Start with you. Don't give a lecture. Don't say oh all these people out here need to speak up these people out here need to tell me what they intend to do it's like no you need to A be quiet. And then stop telling them what to do and ask them what they intend to do.
Mike Goldman: And you just mentioned, you know, you can have, you could hire you or somebody like me
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: To come in and help.
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: For this, I'd hire you, not me. But to follow up on that, tell me a little bit about your business. You know, you've written books. I know you do some, do you do keynote speaking? What does your business look like?
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: How do you go out there and help folks today?
David Marquet: Yeah so I started a company, wrote a book, started to sell. People said, help, come do speeches. So that's fine. So I went out and I kind of learned how to do a talk like the one we did at the Gazelles conference down in Orlando, where you were. And so that was interesting. Used a different part of my brain.
There's no real reason that you should be able to write a book and give a speech, but I think the two different skills anyway. So then we had a company say, well, hey, can you help us? So then we started building a consulting team, but I was still like, because I started the company, I was like the president and I realized this is really. I like, I was on the road all the time. I did a hundred events one year and I really wasn't the right guy to be the president, but because that's how it is. And I really, I was like trying to control everything. So spun the company off. So the consulting company is a different group and they basically do their own thing.
So I do keynotes, I'll do something up to a day. I don't have attention span for anything that's longer days. So I do keynotes and masterclass and that kind of stuff. And often it's part of companies that want to do transformational stuff where we don't, we like to get in and get out. Because if we're not doing that, like we're not going to be like one of these other guys whose objective is to get in and never get out because we don't think that that's consistent with the leadership approach.
The leadership approach is we're going to, like, if you need help building course curriculum, doing some classes and we do train the trainer set building like a playbook for your company. Here's how we're going to manage request forms. And these are a governance thing
where, okay, who gets to make this kind of decision? And is the decision going to be, I did it, or like, we have a ladder here. So we define things in terms of like what's the level of the ladder where you get to influence the decision. I intend to, that's what we like. So that's why it's bigger. And, then we're gone and we want to get out of there.
We want to get some metrics, the beginning metrics at the end. See what we did, and hopefully everyone's happy. And then get out of there. So that's, so I'm better off, I think creating, doing content creation. I love doing keynotes, and I get to fly around the world, and go to all fun places, and trying to convince my wife to go with me.
So that's wonderful. And then we have a team to to really dig in and observe meetings and take metrics. One of the metrics that we have is how much does each person talk in a meeting? And what we're looking for is to see whether there's a big skew,
Typically it's the boss, the senior people end up talking more.
Mike Goldman: Yeah I've actually had leadership teams
David Marquet: Right. Right.
Mike Goldman: I've worked with where I start them off with this two day meeting and I've had to pull the CEO aside first morning break to say, stop talking first because when you talk first, everybody listens.
David Marquet: Right. Right.
Mike Goldman: They take it as an order
David Marquet: Right.
Mike Goldman: And they shut up. Let everybody else talk and that's tough for them to do. So if someone wants to
find out more about you know either hiring you for a keynote or a master class or the consulting thing.
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: Other folks do. Where should people go to find out more?
David Marquet: Yeah, I have a website, davidmarquet.com. You go there, there's a form, just, you can shoot it there. I'm on LinkedIn. You can connect with me there and then send me a note. And then we have a YouTube channel called leadership nudges, where I have about 400. These very short, like, go to dinner, don't order. That's nudge number 61, which short things, because our belief is we act our way to new thinking. We start with action. Not, I don't know what.
Mike Goldman: Yeah, but you know.
David Marquet: You see these things, explosions and stuff?
Mike Goldman: You know and I don't know if it'll be in the video but if you're listening on audio you don't see it. But for some reason on like FaceTime and Zoom and all these different video apps, when you like put your thumb up. You get a big thumbs up. When you say some word.
David Marquet: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: There's fireworks behind you. So, if you didn't see it, there was just fireworks.
David Marquet: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just had fire. Something I said spark fire. So anyway, I'm off track.
Mike Goldman: We we're talking about where to go if people wanna find out more.
David Marquet: Yeah, yeah okay so yeah, davidmarquet.com and the linked in and linked in and then the YouTube channel is called leadership nudges. It's probably it's a lot of teams watch them.
They come out on Wednesday and then they talk about them. But these are little, you know we try and make them very short, 90 second habits or practices that you can do. Go to dinner, don't order, we act our way to new thinking, not think our way into new action.
Mike Goldman: Love it. Well, in wrapping up, you know, I always say if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. David, thanks so much for helping us get there today. Really loved having you on the show.
l--david-marquet_1_04-05-2024_120532: Cheers. Thanks Mike.